William Computer Blog

I’m trying a new software called VitalSource BookShelf. VitalSource Bookshelf is a software that allows you to purchase ebooks online just like the way you buy music. This software is like “iTunes music store for Books”.

The Bookshelf software is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. The online store is powered by Ruby on Rails.

You can purchase and download digital version of your books from the embedded store. From the VitalSource Store, you can browse the book catalogs, and when you find the book that you like you can purchase them and download them.

I downloaded a few free books from the store. Once I finished downloading the book, it is now available in the VitalSource Library. There are also some folders that allows you to sort the book by subjects, date, location, etc.

The software also includes a book reader. The book reader is very nice and simple. There are some useful features such as highlighter and notes. It allows you to add notes/highlight sentences or paragraphs.

You can have more than one colors of highlighters, the included colors are cyan, green, orange, peach, pink, purple, silver, sky blue, and yellow. You can also label a particular color.

There is one problem with this product though, the books are school textbooks. Unfortunately, I am not interested in most of the books sold on VitalSource. They need to sell more books, sell fictional books such as Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, etc. Even better, sell computer books from O’Reilly. Popular business books would be nice too.

iTunes Music Store (iTMS), the online music service by Apple Computer is finally available in Australia. After one year of delay, it’s finally open this morning.

Now, I am giving away free $20 iTunes gift certificate to people who buys hosting from the wonderful Dreamhost. You will need to use my Dreamhost affiliate link to buy them. When you signed up and pay for your hosting fee, e-mail me your dreamhost WebID.

Once everything is verified, I will send you the Gift Certificate. So, if you need hosting why not take this chance to get a hosting and free music.

The new 30GB 5th Generation iPod, the one with video capability, is using Toshiba 30GB hard disk, model MK3008GAL.

This 1.8-inch Hard disk drive made by Toshiba Corporation is Made in Indonesia.

Source from Arstechnica

Google have been updating PageRank for the past 24-48 hours. My blog went up to PageRank 6 (previously 5).

Something funny happened though. MSN website have become PageRank 2 from PageRank 9. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself

This morning I’ve been invited to try out the developer version of Flock. Flock is an open source web browser based on Mozilla Technologies. Using this social browser, you can integrate the browser with various web services such as Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us.

Flock build 0.4.8 is available in three major platforms. Windows (7.3 MB), Mac OS X (9.4 M) , and Linux (7.8 MB). I decided to install Flock on all three platform, on my Windows XP pro, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux. Installation on Windows and Mac OS X is easy. Screenshot for Windows and Mac OS X.

I had a problem when installing on Ubuntu Linux. When I run flock in Linux, it gave me an error message. There is a missing C++ Shared Library missing. I apt-get install libstdc++5, and then I re-ran flock and I did run it sucessfully. Look at the screenshot

Just like Mozilla Firefox, Flock have a Tool menu and under the Tool menu there is extension, themes, and download option. There is also some new menus called Blog Editor and Shelf. Let’s go to Blog Editor.

When I launched Blog Editor [screenshot flock blog editor], the first thing I did was to enter my blog. Unfortunately this version of flock does not work properly with Movable Type 3.2, so I decided to go and try my wordpress.com blog. The blog editor worked wonderfully using on wordpress blog. See my test post.

One of the most interesting feature of this browser is the ability to integrate the browser’s bookmark with the social bookmarks web, del.icio.us. I entered my del.icio.us information and the browser took some time to sync my online bookmark. When the syncing is done, I can see all my del.icio.us bookmark right from the Favorite Manager Tab. From now one, I can just bookmark something right from Flock, apply tags and flock will automatically sync it with del.icio.us. Screenshot of Flock Favorite Manager

What about Shelf? I don’t really know what shelf is use for, but you can drag and drop anything from text, to URL to the shelf window. Screen shot of Flock Shelf

Despite all of the cool stuff, there are still plenty of things to be done with Flock.

• Flock still does not import your Firefox or IE Favorites, even though when I ran the OS X first, it offers me to import my favorites.
• Flock doesn’t support flash.
• Firefox themes do not work with Flock.
• Clear private data does not work for history search result.
• Blogging Service: Wordpress and Blogger work, but Movable type 3.2 blog does not work.
• Closing window using cmd-w does not work in Mac OS X

Wanna try it yourself, go to Flock’s website and register your e-mail address. I should warn you though, this is not a stable product. Make sure you backup your blog entry and your del.icio.us before you try this.

The rumors were true! Apple released two new PowerBook today. The 15-inch and 17-inch. Both PowerBook gets a new display with higher resolution. The 15-inch will have a 1440 x 960 resolution (previously 1280 x 854). The 17-inch will get a new resolution 1680 x 1050 (previously 1440 x 900). Both will be 46% brighter than previous models, and both will have 22% better battery life. SuperDrive is now a standard on all models, even though I’m not sure whether it is a dual layer DVD burner or a single layer. So, no built-in iSight? No FrontRow?

The rumour about PowerMac G5 is also true. PowerMac G5 are also updated. The new Powermac come with dual core processors, 1MB L2 cache per core, up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM, 1TB of internal storage, PCI Express.

The PowerMac support four new nVidia cards, including the Quadro FX 4500 - all four cards support 30” cinema display.

The most powerful PowerMac of all is the PowerMac Quad. The PowerMac Quad is a dual CPU dual-core 2.5 GHz.

Guest what? The rumour about photo editing software is also true! Apple’s also introducing a new post-production tool for photographers today. It’s called Aperture.

All the rumors are true. The apple store is now back open.

It’s 12 AM New York Time and I’m waiting for the new product announcement from Apple. I just went to check the Apple online store from Apple’s website and it’s down for updates.

So, there is a new product after all. So which one would it be? The Dual core PowerMac, a new PowerBook or an image editing software. Stay tuned for more announcement.

I need an orkut invitation, I need to find someone. Can anyone with an orkut invitation please send me an invitation. Thanks.

[Update] Thanks to Ronny for the invitation.

Macworld is reporting that Apple is holding another press conference on October 19 in New York.

I hope Apple will announce the new PowerBook G4. The PowerBook hasn’t been updated since January. I’ve been waiting for the new release since last April. Will the new PowerBook comes with a built-in iSight camera? I’d love to play around with Phone Booth.app.

I’ll be waiting for the next one more thing…

You can now download Safari/Webkit and WebKit+SVG from http://nightly.webkit.org/builds. In order to distinguish these with the built-in Safari, the nightly builds Webkit are using gold-rimmed icons and gold-rimmed icon with SVG.

The Mafia Boss is a free web based multiplayer online game, based on the Real Mafia Life so called “La Cosa Nostra”.

After you have created your mafioso, the first thing you have to do is to hire people to do your operation, and to protect you. Go recruit some hitmen, thugs, whores, card dealers, hustlers, and dealers. You started the game with $1 million. Once you have enough people, you need to go to the black market and buy some weapons and drugs to keep your people happy.

Now that you have enough people and weapon, you can start collecting money. You can start getting your whores to start pimping, or your hustlers to start collecting loans. Once you have enough money, go and buy some more drugs, or recruit more people.

If you think you are powerful enough, you can start attacking other gangster or you can build your own family and gather other gangster to join you.

So if you wanna know what it’s like to be a real Mafia Don like Alcapone, John Gotti and have all the little mafiosos “Kiss your Ring or Die”, then go and join!

According to Priyadi, WCB came first onTop 100 Indonesian Blog.

I am honored to be on that list but I don’t think I deserve it because there are so many Indonesian blogs with better content and better user discussion. The reason why I came on the top of the list is because I generate so many incoming links.

I generate so much incoming links NOT because people recommended me or they refer to one of my blog entries, but because of my contribution to the Wordpress Theme Competition Blog. The Golden Grey is used by so many wordpress powered blog.

Welcome everybody who came from Priyadi’s place.

So, the one more thing event that everyone were talking about finally came out. It’s actually more than one more thing. Two things were announced at the event. A new iMac G5, and iPod Video.

The iMac G5 now comes with a built-in iSight camera giving you the ability to video chat with your friends and family right out of the box. The computer also comes with a software called Front Row and a remote control called the Apple Remote. The Apple Remote makes it easy to navigate through all the music, photos, videos, and dvd. You can use the Apple remote to navigate Front Row quickly.

Apple now only offers two iMac G5, the 1.9 GHz 17-inch and 2.1 GHz 20-inch. The 2.1 GHz also feature a faster frontside bus at 700 MHz. The iMac also uses a new DDR2 RAM instead of DDR. DDR2 is also used for the graphic card (ATI Radeon X600 XT). Finally, instead of apple mouse, the Mighty Mouse is now included.

The new iMac no longer ship with a dial up modem, or the option to buy a built-in modem. You can just purchae the Apple USB modem if you really need a modem. I definitely don’t need a modem but there are people who still needs dial up modem, according to Adinoto.

The next one more thing is an Apple Video. The new iPod is thinner and just like iPod nano the color black is also available. You can now buy Music Video and TV Shows from iTunes Music Store but there are no films yet.

Betanews is reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo are set to announce a deal to link MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Both MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger users will be able to communicate with each other with text and voice chat.

I used both MSN and Yahoo Messenger using Adium IM client. When both protocol is linked, will you dump any of your MSN/Yahoo account. Which one would you dump, Yahoo or MSN?

For months I’ve been wanting to replace my old Microsoft wheel mouse optical because the cable for the mouse often got stuck somewhere and stop me from moving the mouse freely. At first I wanted to buy Apple’s Mighty Mouse, because of the beautiful design but that wouldn’t solve my problem because the Mighty Mouse is not a cordless mouse.

I finally got the MX1000 from Logitech today. For months, I’ve heard so much review about this mouse. The Logitech MX1000 is a Laser mouse, which Logitech claims is 20 times more sensitivity to surface detail than optical.

The mouse have a good battery life. It can go for days without recharging. There is a power meter on the mouse to indicate the current battery life.

I connected the mouse to my Mac, and set the application switch button on the thumb to trigger Expose. The scroll wheel is really nice, it supports the usual vertical scrolls and also clicks left and right for horizontal scrolling.

The size of the mouse is a bit big, but it is the right size for a person with big hand like me. If you have a small hand, then you better go to the shop and give it a try first.

What’s the laser for? Well, I usually bring my laptop to my bed at night, so I can use the mouse on my bed and still point precisely. MX1000 on Logitech

Locomotive is a flexible one-click solution to Ruby on Rails development for Mac OS X. Instead of installing one by one, you can just download the self-contained application giving you fully functional Rails development platform.

Locomotive contains the Rails framework, Lighttpd with FastCGI, and SQLite embedded database..

In short, Locomotive is like XAMPP, except XAMPP is for Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Perl. Locomotive does not include MySQL. However, it does include Ruby binding for MySQL or PostgreSQL. So, Locomotive is ready whenever you need MySQL/PostgreSQL support.

In addition to the Locomotive min bundles, there is also Locomotive max which includes everything in the min bundle with additional ruby application/library such as RMagick, rails_product, RedCloth, BlueCloth, and many more.

Within the Locomotive.app, you can create new rails application, add an existing Rails application, run/stop the webserver, you can also set different port for different application. Here’s a screenshot:

Since Locomotive is an open source software, you can also download the source code of the application.

Google just released Google Reader, a web-based RSS reader. Just like gmail, google reader is using AJAX technology.

For those who already use another RSS reader, Google reader allows you to import your subscribtion via the OPML file. I exported my subscribtions from NetNewsWire and imported them into Google Reader. It took quite a while to import my 166 subscribtions. Just like gmail, my subscribtion groups became label.

Interested to know more about Google Reader? Read the Google Reader Review from Unofficial Google Blog or just go ahead and try it!

The FreeBSD project have a new website. The new site is valid XHTML 1.0!.

The new site design is done by Emily Boyd. She also designed the website of the open source database PostgreSQL.